Getting a website under control

I spent the day getting RMVR under control. Specifically, under version control.

Since I first took responsibility for the site, I’ve been using CVS for some subdirectories, primarily all the club forms/documents, and the club’s constitution, rules, and exceptions to the General Competition Rules, an arcane set of criteria that had barely been maintained in the breach.

I’ve been using Subversion and Trac at work, and when I saw that my webhost DreamHost (affiliate link) was offering Subversion, RMVR became the first guinea pig.

First the cleanup. After doing a full backup, I ran Xenu against the site, finding all the orphan files and eliminating them (including moving all the obsolete photo albums to Flickr).

isnoop.net’s entry Convert Your Website to Subversion provided an excellent step by step tutorial on setting up the repository, and defining import, staging, development and live directories.

I chose not to use any converters from CVS to Subversion; the only history I cared about maintaining was the change history on the rules, and I added that after the initial import.

Everything’s looking nice and tidy now, and I’ve got a very clean Xenu report on the site.